Michael Adams edged nearer the all-time record for British Championship titles last weekend when the Taunton-based grandmaster won his ninth national championship at Liverpool.
Adams, who relaxes by watching cricket at Somerset’s county ground, has now equalled Henry Atkins’s total of nine championships from the first half of the last century, but remains one short of Jonathan Penrose’s 10 crowns from the second half. Adams’s first British title was in 1989 at age 17, still the youngest ever, but in the next 20 years he concentrated on the world championship, coming within a hair’s breadth of a reunification match with Garry Kasparov in 2004 before losing in the Fide final.
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